


sealed with a --

by availedobscurity



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Reunion, eventually this will be a two-parter but today is not that day, i let him solve a train murder and i didn't even let you see it, off-mars roadtrip, post-juno steel and the promised land
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 20:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12801312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/availedobscurity/pseuds/availedobscurity
Summary: s/o to: victoria and irene for beta-ing! meg for talking about poison lipstick fics and the thirst we all share for them! the incredibly slow day i had at work which enabled me to write this! feel free to find me on tumblr at alessandrastronger.tumblr.com, and check out penumbraexchange.tumblr.com to get in on the penumbra exchange promptfest if you haven't already! there will be a part 2 to this at some point, but probably not especially soon, so i hope this is okay as a temporary standalone. anyway, thanks~





	sealed with a --

A high-society dinner party fit Juno Steel exactly like a well-tailored suit did: they both made for a nice image, and they both made him want to tear off his own skin if he was in them for too long. He scratched at his inner arm through the fabric and the just-too-short cuffs and tried to look like he was paying attention to any of the bright, jovial bursts of sound coming from Dame Raleigh’s mouth. He didn’t know what they had to laugh about, after the day they’d had, but growing up in Hyperion City, he’d learned that as a rule, the wealthier someone was, the more there was for them to laugh at.

Still, they’d spent the last eight or so hours on a train getting interrogated about the corpse in seat 31C, so they sure seemed to have either a more wide-ranging sense of humor or a fatter bank account than most. “Now, Juno here--may I call you Juno?” They didn’t give him the time to answer. “Juno is from _Mars!_ Can you believe that? A detective on Mars! Like something from a stream! You must be very busy,” they said, and nudged his shoulder playfully. “And so _exotic_ , too, just look at him! Did you notice anything, about those eyes of his?”

Juno flinched backwards as three people leaned in too closely for anyone who wasn’t planning to take him home and show him a good time. “Is that a cybernetic?” one of them asked, and Raleigh tugged his arm again, so he was pulled a half-step closer to them and away from their gawking friends.

“Don’t crowd the poor thing, he’s had a tiring day!” they said. “But yes, his eye is scientifically augmented! So don’t get up to any shenanigans, Aislinn, Juno here will catch you like,” they punctuated the sentence with a snap of their fingers, right in front of their companion’s face, _”that.”_

Juno took the opportunity to loose his arm from their grip, and swiveled his head around to see if there was anything to drink, preferably served in a bottle large enough to crawl into. It was to no avail. There were only something like 15 people in the enormous room, decorated in thin sheets of backlit marble, and nothing had even been served yet. They were all just… mingling.

It was a nightmare. He was never working for free again, no matter how many people were poisoned in the aisle seat of his row _right_ when he was about to get up and explore the train. And so what if the person next to him got accused of killing them? It had nothing to do with him, even if every other detective he knew had solved at least one train murder already. Train murders weren’t so great. They were just regular murders with worse catering.

“Hah! You’ve certainly gone off-planet at an advantageous time for your line of work, then,” some woman in an enormous silk coat cut in. “Why, under that new mayor of yours there won’t be any crimes left for you to solve!”

Juno didn’t say anything, only glared. A man piled in furs chimed in.”You absolutely must meet my daughter, she is very interested in the reformation of our less socially-advanced planets. She would be thrilled to have an actual Martian to talk to,” he gushed, and Juno tried to remember what the laws were on Saturn for punching the placid smile off someone’s face. It was probably illegal, and the idea of getting deported made him more nauseous and numb than the idea of shutting this guy up made him grimly satisfied. He comforted himself by imagining it, vividly.

“Martians are the native inhabitants. Died out thousands of years ago, so the kid’s out of luck there,” Juno said tersely, looking desperately for any escape route. Raleigh seized onto his arm before he had the chance to look, laughing again.

“He’s such a _card,_ isn’t he? And a sweetheart, too! He even tried to say I shouldn’t go to the trouble of inviting him, after all that hard work he did, and with nowhere to go after--can you believe that? A lovely, intelligent, foreign lady like this, and with absolutely no plans on a Friday night? So of _course_ I couldn’t just let him waltz off to some sad hotel without tasting life on Saturn--real life, not just those horribly gaudy tourist attractions! Would you believe, he was going to go look at the _rings?_ Like you can’t see them right up there in the sky on the plane in!” Dame Raleigh said, their whole voice a laugh, and Juno eyed the window, trying to measure it in his head for a possible escape route. Maybe. He’d make it work if he had to.

He had mentioned the rings one time, to try to make them stop talking to him. It didn’t work. He should have taken that as a sign of things to come.

“Now, you must meet my husbands, they were so glad to hear you were there to save me--oh, Andrew! Have you seen Mitchell anywhere? I want them to be able to thank this wonderful detective personally!” A very tall man in a full-length robe shrugged, silent.

“Most people thank me by paying me,” Juno suggested.

“Oh, dear, that’s so very gouache! Martian customs are so vulgar, how _did_ you survive?”

“By getting paid, mostly,” Juno said drily, but they weren’t listening anymore. All of their attention was on their husband.

“Andrew! I asked you specifically to find Mitchell so we could all meet this fascinating Martian together! Where is he?” 

Andrew shrugged again.

“Don’t give me that, our house isn’t so big we could lose him to it!” Juno snorted disagreement. “Did you check his office? His sub-office? The secret tunnel behind the bookcase?” They quickly turned back to their dinner companions, who were now watching closely. “Do pretend you didn’t hear that part, will you? It’s a surprise!”

Juno didn’t know how that constituted a surprise, and he didn’t want to, either. He let the interrogation continue around him, going nowhere, for another sentence or two, then sighed.

“I could look for him,” Juno offered, flat. He was pretty sure he could figure out which room his coat was in, and then find a way out of this maze of a house from there. He just needed to get out. At least the socialites in Hyperion City were decent enough to admit how indecent they were. And besides, if he was already going to spend all his time wondering if THEIA was finally going to short out his whole brain or not anyway, he could at least get some use out of the thing and make an early escape from a terrible dinner.

Raleigh squealed. “A detective! Looking for a missing person in my home!”

Andrew clapped excitedly and nodded agreement.

“He’s not _missing_ , he’s-” In a rare but welcome move, Juno stopped talking before he sabotaged himself. He didn’t know what they were so excited about. Life on Saturn wasn’t something he really got, yet. “Okay. I’ll, do that, then. Explore your house for… clues, and all that.”

“You are too much! We’ll toast to you when you get back. Tina! Go find a champagne with a nice vintage on it, will you? From Earth if you can,” they shouted across the room, and Juno didn’t bother hiding his apprehension.

“Uh, yeah. Okay. It might take a while, don’t wait up for me,” Juno said, walking backwards through the door, half-expecting someone to stop him. Instead, all he saw were people huddling together in too-elaborate outfits and an overly-decorated room, speculating and smiling behind their hands.

There was something eerie about it, and he took a deep, heavy breath when he finally got out the door.

The suit, he decided, he would keep. Every half-decent outfit in his closet was something he was put in against his will in one way or another, and he might as well keep the trend running while he was living out of a suitcase. He would just wear it on his way out and save himself the time to get changed. All he had to do to make his escape was find his coat, and then the door. Wouldn’t be too hard, to traverse a dimly-lit maze of hallways full of terrible art that was there only to announce the purchaser’s obscene wealth. Wouldn’t even have to use the THEIA, probably.

And sure, something felt wrong about the whole thing, beyond the obvious cultural differences, but a lot of things had felt wrong since he left. The THEIA had been messing with his brain for a long time, more with each update. It could manually override his control of his body. And the thing about his body was that his brain was part of it. 

Juno wanted to think all of his unease was still his, but he couldn’t make himself believe it without a doubt. It would be simple to reach right into his brain and move all the pieces around. Send an electrical impulse to the right bundle of nerves and it was his idea to go to Saturn instead of, say, Neptune; to grab seat 31A when there were ten other empty rows between it and the door; to find clues that pointed to a ward with considerable inheritance to gain rather than the jealous business rival’s spouse seated next to him; to end up at a dinner party where nobody knew goddamn anything about Mars or the people on it.

It wasn’t that he had trusted his thoughts before, but he had at least been able to believe unequivocally that they were his. (Sometimes, for a second, he would think in Ben’s voice, but Ben had never gotten a chance to be as bitter and empty as Juno was. And sometimes he would think in his mother’s voice, and that was harder to identify as his own, because she had hated Juno more than anything by the end. The two of them were too like mother, like child). When he decided to turn left instead of right, when he opened one door or the other, he couldn’t know for sure whether it was really his own idea, or another opportunity for someone else to pull the strings. He couldn’t know whether the unburied traumas that stopped him in his tracks were the same old self-sabotage he’d been digging holes for his entire life or if O’Flaherty was holding a very long shovel from planets away.

His spine twitched at the memory of what the THEIA could do, what he’d had the Piranha _make_ the THEIA do, the pain that was just a feeling of wrongness and intrusion in every nerve he had. _Don’t think about it. Focus on finding your stuff and getting out of here and never going back there again._

He found his coat in a closet the size of his apartment, and Juno resented the room as much as he could before checking his pockets, putting the coat on, and heading in search of a door.

He made it two more hallways and connecting rooms before he caught the scent.

It was familiar. The kind of smell a person could spend days trying to wash off, and then months trying to remember exactly. Catching it in the air now, Juno knew he’d never manage to get it quite right.

He turned the THEIA on, pretending that the racing of his heart was the result of a long day catching up with him. “Heat seeking protocols,” he said without a moment’s hesitation, and half his vision lit into black and color.

There were footprints quickly fading from blue to dark purple, marking careful, quiet steps. Juno didn’t know how anyone could move silently in heels, but he knew one person who did.

Juno did what detectives were trained to and followed the prints down the hall. Through the largest, most industrial kitchen he’d ever seen. Around the corner.

To an amber-colored stone door whose knob glowed with a barely-indigo handprint in half his vision.

The knob turned, too loud in his hand.

The room was dark, empty. Or, it would have looked that way to anyone else. Juno knew better.

He took a deep breath.

“Nureyev?”

A figure unfolded itself and rose from beneath the desk. “Do you make a habit of whispering other people’s secrets into every dark room you encounter?”

“Not much of a secret if everyone in the room knows it,” Juno said, feeling divorced from his body. He was back in that doorway. He wondered if Nureyev was still asleep in bed, mumbling his name to himself, or if he’d woken up and gone on his way while Juno was frozen in place.

He looked the same, exactly the same, as the night he’d stopped being Rex Glass. Like nothing in between had happened. If Nureyev was anywhere but here he was trapped in Juno’s handcuffs. He didn’t know why he knew it so deeply; he only knew it, unattached to any thought process or leadup. They were both trapped in the second before leaving. It was the only way either of them could stay.

“Yes, well,” Nureyev said, and picked up a pen off the desk, “You don’t have to be in the room to listen.” He twisted it in two pieces to reveal a microphone, which he dropped on the ground and slowly crushed beneath his heel. Juno could only watch.

He knew it was real, his memory never made Nureyev look right or smell right or sound the right way, but he couldn’t make it feel like this was an experience he was living. He didn’t even know if it mattered, whether this was real or not, whether Nureyev really was destroying surveillance devices in someone’s office the night he snuck out of a fancy off-Mars dinner party. Nureyev tilted his head towards the light, and his lips were suddenly lit red like blood.

“Check behind the picture frame,” Juno said automatically. He looked around the room to see if THEIA could find anything else, and came up empty, with the exception of what Juno assumed was the aforementioned tunnel behind the bookcase.

Nureyev looked at him appraisingly, then walked to the frame, which held a horrible portrait of what seemed to be an opera singer and several dogs. He wondered how Nureyev could still turn his back to him, without worrying Juno would put a stunbolt right into it. Instead, the thief was almost careless as he lifted the unwieldy frame off the wall and scanned its back. “Ah.” He plucked a small camera off the canvas, and dropped it on the ground, repeating the same procedure he’d done with the microphone. He didn’t take his eyes off of Juno, and Juno tried very hard to hide what the action of Peter Nureyev nonchalantly grinding something to dust beneath his feet was doing to him.

“What are you doing here,” Juno choked, trying to sound normal.

“My job,” Peter said, dispassionate as he opened the top drawer of the file cabinet and paged through. “And you? Something’s finally brought you off of your irradiated desert planet, I see. And with a new eye for company. Not a cheap one, either. And judging from the subpar fit of your suit, your financial standing hasn’t changed one bit, so I assume you’ve found yourself a benefactor? Perhaps someone connected with the Raleighs, or?”

Juno cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Peter stared at him, making some internal judgment. “Then let’s not.” He unlocked a drawer, fluid and quick. “Did you know Raleigh runs an underground fighting ring in the east corridor? People are paying thousands of creds a month to fight each other hand to hand.” He lifted a file, scanned it into his comms, and put it back. “The idle rich never cease to amaze.”

“Huh. Now that you mention it, they definitely have that vibe.” Juno shook his head. “Never saw the point of those things.”

“They don’t use what they have,” Nureyev said. “They collect and they collect and never take advantage of what they really want. Their lives are empty pageantry, Juno.”

Juno scowled. “I know that, it’s not like I haven’t seen my share of underground fight clubs for all the newly rich who can’t figure out how to feel anything. What I meant was, if you really want to fight somebody all you have to do is show up in any bar parking lot after sundown and take your pick.”

Behind his glasses, Nureyev’s face couldn’t decide whether it should be alarmed or amused. “I missed,” he started, and Juno’s lungs took the split-second’s pause between words to pull all the air in the room into his chest and hold it, “your city’s particular take on etiquette. Marsian customs will always elude me, I’m afraid.”

“We don’t really have them,” Juno said with a shrug, letting the air back out. It hung with a weight of surreality. They were talking. They had been talking for seconds and seconds now. And it was awkward and stiff but it was more comfortable than he’d been all night, and it still didn’t feel like a thing that was really happening to him.

“It’s harder to see from inside, I’m sure,” Peter said carefully, making considerations. He walked to the other side of the desk, leaned back against it, and there was Rex Glass once more. “Really, in every house but this one Saturn’s quite nice. Calm, mostly. But as always, the biggest criminal in the room’s taken a shine to you.”

“Yeah, I think I just have that kind of face,” Juno sighed, and Peter Nureyev laughed, not cruelly as Juno imagined he would if they ever met again. It was… nice.

Peter leaned towards him, his glasses flashing in the limited light and obscuring his eyes. “Yes, you do,” he said. “It’s one made to be beloved by mobsters and murderers and smugglers and thieves and riggers of elections alike. A shame, that you can’t bring yourself to be kept among them. Always waiting for dark and stealing away from those who would try to take from the light.”

“That’s, that’s not,” Juno said, trying not to feel gutpunched, trying not to say _imsorryimsorryimsoryy_ over and over again, “That’s, don’t. Wait.” He grabbed for anything else before his mouth could move on without him. “Did you say something about rigged elections?”

Peter raised a single eyebrow. “I thought that was why you were here? Raleigh’s husband’s running for Planetary Council representative. They’re stealing all the votes they can get their hands on. I was asked to lift a few blueprints from their other husband’s prototype manual, but I thought while I was here I could steal some of those votes back.They should all be preoccupied with dinner for the next few hours. Well, two of three, anyway; the third has another role in this.” Juno thought to Mitchell, and wondered how exactly Peter Nureyev had taken him from the equation.

“Nureyev, I’m just trying to get out of here,” he said, holding his hands up. “I’m not investigating anything, or,” Juno paused. He’d been thinking a lot about rigged elections, lately. “What’s the husband doing? Buying votes, discrediting other candidates, sending them on a wild chase after a fake city?”

Nureyev studied him. “Juno, the last thing I need right now is a self-employed detective underfoot while I try to do my work.” Juno tried not to feel stung by it while Nureyev pulled himself to his full height and took long, intentional strides towards him. “But if you’re ‘just trying to get out of here’,” he said deliberately, “Let’s get out.”

“What?” Juno asked, the sudden change catching him off guard.

“You know we both left something unfinished back in that hotel room, Juno,” Peter said. “And the thing about leaving something undone is that you can pick it up again at any time and continue from the exact place you left it, don’t you agree?”

Juno took a step backwards. “That’s. That’s over, Nureyev, I, I left you there, and you left, and--you said you’d never see me again, Nureyev,” he said, his mouth working without him. Nureyev continued his slow advance, languid, like a snake preparing to wrap something up and constrict it and swallow it whole.

“We aren’t in that hotel room anymore, Juno, and we won’t be again. But we’re here, together, now, and we can either let this miraculous happenstance pass unremarked upon, or,” Juno didn’t know when Peter had walked him back into the wall, but Juno was caught with his back against hard, smooth stone. “We can make it remarkable.”

Peter leaned down, and barely brushed his lips against the corner of Juno’s mouth, and Juno felt his cold lipstick leave a trace behind. It burned against his skin and Juno’s spine rolled from the way the skin beneath suddenly felt alive. His neck tipped his face upwards for him, made him catch Nureyev’s lips with his own before the thief could turn his head away.

It had been a while since he’d tasted anything familiar. Usually when he did stuff like this he was trying to forget. This time, he was burying himself in what he’d left behind, gripping the fabric of Nureyev’s shirt and keeping him in place until the thief pulled back from him.

 _”Juno,”_ Nureyev said, breathless and uncharacteristically surprised. Under Nureyev’s gaze Juno remembered what it was like to have someone stare at him not like he hung the stars but like he was made of each and every one of them. That look pinned him in place, froze him, and he watched Nureyev’s softened gaze turn calculating. Not like when he was playing a card game for Juno’s life, but in the same concerned way that Rita’s did when she was trying to figure out how long Juno had gone without sleeping, and how much longer he could stay awake before she was obligated by some arbitrary measure of health and safety to lock him in his office.

Juno didn’t want care or consideration or kindness. If he wanted people to fawn over him and pity him he could go right back to that disgustingly opulent ballroom where he was that poor detective from terrible Mars. “Cold feet?” Juno taunted, and strengthened his grip on Nureyev’s collar, tugging him back in, kissing him harder.

Nureyev broke away again. “Juno, we should--” Nureyev said, and Juno cut him off with another kiss.

“What happened to living in the goddamn present all the time, Nureyev?” Juno asked when he came up for air again. “You wanna pick up where we left it, let’s do it. You’re the only familiar thing I have, Nureyev, I didn’t know Mars was home until I left it and now I don’t have anything so let’s just _do this_ ,” and he didn’t know what had loosened those words from his mouth--maybe Nureyev’s tongue on his teeth, maybe the pleasant burning around his lips--but they had their desired effect. Nureyev paused, and Juno saw the second he lost his resolve.

“Remember, you asked for this,” the thief whispered before he descended on him, and Juno’s heart skipped a few beats at the edges in his eyes, in his voice, and he gave up the lead to Nureyev, relieved to be carried along for a little bit and to be able to sigh into his mouth and feel his eyes glaze over while Peter Nureyev’s hands pushed under his shirt or tilted his head back or wrapped around him.

With each kiss Juno became more light-headed. Like a teenager, like some idiot who’d never had anyone come into his life and leave it and then come back like some goddamn miracle. His lips felt numb from it. It was incredible, how Peter Nureyev could make him feel everything until he didn’t feel anything at all. He couldn’t even make his hands work right. No one else alive made him feel things like this, not in the whole damn galaxy, and Juno hadn’t even needed to leave Hyperion City to know that, but it was nice to see he hadn’t been disproven yet.

Nureyev pulled back, kissed the space behind his ear, and Juno turned his head to follow with a small, needy moan, but the thief stayed out of reach.

“That should be more than enough,” he said, a breath from Juno’s face. “Now, Juno, don’t be alarmed, but you may find it’s difficult to speak for the next minute or so.”

Juno snorted. “You say that every time you kiss a guy?” he asked, or tried to, but his mouth felt wrong, like his lips and his tongue were half a step behind everything else, the _t_ s and _k_ s not making quite the right shape. Juno lurched forward, trying to break out of Nureyev’s grip, but his spidery hands kept him pressed back against the stone.

“Careful, Juno, you don’t want to fall,” Nureyev said, looking closely at his eyes.

“What, what’s happening to me?” Juno asked with more difficulty than expected.

“I suspect that by now you are losing feeling in your extremities,” he said, unaffected. He took Juno’s right hand in his left, his right arm still wrapped around Juno, keeping him held upright against the wall in a parody of a dance. Juno bent his fingers feebly in his grip. “Symptoms are progressing as normal, though they seem to be accelerated by the unusually large dosage. It’s really only supposed to be transmitted through the skin. Your hands are going to start feeling a bit cold, Juno,” he said, his tone factual and impassive.

Juno stared up at him, dumbstruck again, and worked his jaw, trying to remember how to manually control the functions of his mouth. He thought of Nureyev’s lips, so bright red, so cold at first, and then burning sigils against his skin, against his mouth. “Your lipstick,” Juno accused. “You poisoned me?”

Peter smirked at him, showing those razor-sharp teeth. “Have you already forgotten? You did ask for it. I appreciate that you would give me the credit, but, as always, we work much better as a team.”

“Why did you poison me?” Juno asked, dumbstruck.

“As I said: the last thing I need while I try to steal patents and stop the subversion of democracy is a detective underfoot.” Nureyev kept his grip on him. They were pressed together so closely. “Seeing how often things go spectacularly awry when we’re on the same side, I would hate to see what happens when we are opposed.”

“You,” Juno said, and he knew exactly what he wanted to say but he couldn’t find any of the words for it. His legs were starting to feel the way he did after his first glass of whiskey, if the first glass of whiskey were full of poison.

“Shhhh, Juno, we only have a moment before even you won’t be stubborn enough to stay awake.” Juno tried to push him away in protest, but his legs began to collapse under him instead. Peter Nureyev carefully slid him down the wall to a sitting position. “Look at me, Juno,” he said, crouching in front of him and staring into his eyes. Juno turned his face away, and Peter cupped his face in both of his hands to get a closer look, clicking his tongue. “Your pupils are different sizes, which could be a sign of a terrible headache to come, or simply an interaction with your cybernetic. I haven’t taken the opportunity to use this on anyone who has been augmented before.” Satisfied, Peter gave both sides of his face a little pat, like one would a child, and reached in his pockets until he produced a vial and a large white handkerchief. He downed the contents, swished them in his mouth, and then spat them into the white cloth, which he folded up and moved to the inside pocket of his jacket.

Juno tried to get up, but Peter was able to knock him off balance with just one hand.

“Now, now, Juno, you don’t want to fall over and hurt yourself. I know you’re eager to get out of here. This dose should only last a few hours, ten at most, though if you’ve been overworked or dehydrated the dizziness and headache will persist for much longer,” Peter said, removing Juno’s coat. Juno tried to shake Peter off of him, but his arm was moving so much slower than he wanted it to.

“Buy a guy a drink first,” he protested in a mumble while Peter lifted Juno’s back off of the wall so he could free the coat and bundle it in his arms. That done, Peter loosened Juno’s tie and undid the top button on his shirt.

“Oh, thank you for reminding me. The poison has negative interactions with alcohol.” He was speaking quickly, and Juno felt his eyelids fluttering to stay open. “Most hot sauces, too, strangely enough, so be sure to avoid them both until it’s all out of your system.” It was probably a bad sign that Juno couldn’t feel it at all when Peter put two fingers on the pulse point at Juno’s wrist. “Give it a day or two. And be sure to drink plenty of water when you wake up; you’ll be quite nauseous, but it will be worse if you’re dehydrated.”

“Nureyev,” Juno said with a mouth that only made unfamiliar shapes, fog clouding everything in him. “This is a hell of a way to get revenge,” he said numbly, the sounds all half-lodged in his mouth. “I’m gonna be stuck here for weeks when they find me.”

Peter released Juno’s wrist, and it made a faint _slap_ where it fell limp against the ground. “Not revenge at all, Juno. I’m only keeping my promise to you. By the time you wake up I’ll be long gone and you’ll be the last thing on the Raleigh household’s collective mind. You’re free to come and go as you please,” Peter said, transferring Juno’s sagging body to the ground, where laying the detective’s head carefully down, his coat a makeshift pillow. “Not right now, of course, but when you wake.”

“Should be revenge,” Juno muttered. “Shouldn’t have left you like that.”

Peter stopped moving. “No,” he agreed. “You shouldn’t have.” He ran a hand over Juno’s hair, and sighed. “Juno, you petulant, intolerable fool,” he said, a little bit sad, and Juno couldn’t help but agree.

“Sweet dreams, detective,” Peter Nureyev said, bringing the back of Juno’s hand to his lips for a final kiss, and then he stood, backing away into a fog that was too thick for Juno to see, for Juno to think, for Juno to do anything but close his eyes and succumb to it.

**Author's Note:**

> s/o to: victoria and irene for beta-ing! meg for talking about poison lipstick fics and the thirst we all share for them! the incredibly slow day i had at work which enabled me to write this! feel free to find me on tumblr at alessandrastronger.tumblr.com, and check out penumbraexchange.tumblr.com to get in on the penumbra exchange promptfest if you haven't already! there will be a part 2 to this at some point, but probably not especially soon, so i hope this is okay as a temporary standalone. anyway, thanks~


End file.
